JoceAndChris
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This was just such an amazing artistic experience I can't not post about it.
http://www.nunkie.co.uk/schedule.html
I saw it at The Manor, Hemingford Grey, on Saturday, a place well worth a visit in its own right, as both Britain's oldest inhabited house, and the place where Lucy Boston wrote The Children of Green Knowe.
You park in the pretty village, and walk along the pitch black river path with the moon glistening on the water and the dark shapes of sleeping animals. A little way along, is an old, rusted iron gate and an avenue of fir topiared in a chess piece fantasy. In the daytime, the gardens are a riot of colour, but in the evening it's deserted and dark, and you have the sense that you're entering somewhere very old, and very special indeed. You're greeted by an elegant lady with beautiful manners and shown in, up winding stairs where every space is crowded with some lovely piece of art, and into her bedroom! Here wine is served in the interval, and you can look at the lovely 1940s wall murals, or her laundry, or perhaps a Norman window or two. From this chamber you are led to the remainder of the beautiful Great Hall, a high ceilinged yet small room littered with the sofas, mattresses and cushions Lucy Boston cobbled together for her musical soirees, given for airmen in the War years. It's lit by candlelight, the music pours atmospherically from Lucy's gramophone, and you sit with your wine and listen to Robert Lloyd-Parry's utterly gripping, believable and spine tingling performance of probably the best ghost stories in English Literature, written by the antiquarian M R James. ( and the stories themselves often focused on period properties, or period objects)
The house isn't over restored, and Diana Boston says this is because there's never really been anyone living there with much money. But the ancient tattiness, the sense of history, the thought that you are listening to a story in the same spot where Knights in clanking armour told their stories of the Crusades is moving beyond words.
There are some more chances to hear the M R James in the run up to Christmas; it's worth making the trip.
Many thanks to Gareth for alerting me to this.
http://www.nunkie.co.uk/schedule.html
I saw it at The Manor, Hemingford Grey, on Saturday, a place well worth a visit in its own right, as both Britain's oldest inhabited house, and the place where Lucy Boston wrote The Children of Green Knowe.
You park in the pretty village, and walk along the pitch black river path with the moon glistening on the water and the dark shapes of sleeping animals. A little way along, is an old, rusted iron gate and an avenue of fir topiared in a chess piece fantasy. In the daytime, the gardens are a riot of colour, but in the evening it's deserted and dark, and you have the sense that you're entering somewhere very old, and very special indeed. You're greeted by an elegant lady with beautiful manners and shown in, up winding stairs where every space is crowded with some lovely piece of art, and into her bedroom! Here wine is served in the interval, and you can look at the lovely 1940s wall murals, or her laundry, or perhaps a Norman window or two. From this chamber you are led to the remainder of the beautiful Great Hall, a high ceilinged yet small room littered with the sofas, mattresses and cushions Lucy Boston cobbled together for her musical soirees, given for airmen in the War years. It's lit by candlelight, the music pours atmospherically from Lucy's gramophone, and you sit with your wine and listen to Robert Lloyd-Parry's utterly gripping, believable and spine tingling performance of probably the best ghost stories in English Literature, written by the antiquarian M R James. ( and the stories themselves often focused on period properties, or period objects)
The house isn't over restored, and Diana Boston says this is because there's never really been anyone living there with much money. But the ancient tattiness, the sense of history, the thought that you are listening to a story in the same spot where Knights in clanking armour told their stories of the Crusades is moving beyond words.
There are some more chances to hear the M R James in the run up to Christmas; it's worth making the trip.
Many thanks to Gareth for alerting me to this.
